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Tropical modernisms: art and architecture in Rio de Janeiro in the 1950s

TROPICAL MODERNISMS:
ART AND ARCHITECTURE IN RIO DE JANEIRO IN THE 1950S
by
Aleca Lipskey Le Blanc
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ART HISTORY)
August 2011
Copyright 2011 Aleca Lipskey Le Blanc

In the 1950s, Brazil reinvented itself economically, politically and culturally. New interest in, and more importantly, access to technological innovations in communications and manufacturing transformed Brazilian society in previously unimaginable ways. This dissertation locates Rio de Janeiro's Museu de Arte Moderna at the dynamic center of a cultural nexus that includes architecture, urbanism, art criticism, art education and the collecting and display of visual art, revealing how the city's visual culture was profoundly made over at mid-century. It was in the midst of this period, in 1952, that Rio de Janeiro's first modern art museum was inaugurated under the leadership of Brazil's first female museum director, Niomar Moniz Sodré. This study of institutional history documents one of the most effective techniques that Moniz Sodré and others deployed in their rapid expansion of the museum; the deliberate absorption, translation, and re-presentation of modernist discourses of foreign derivation, such as Concrete art, International Style architecture, Bauhaus pedagogy, and MoMA's institutional framework. This study contends that these forms and strategies, which signified modernity to audiences in Brazil and abroad, took on new and unexpected meanings when they combined with Brazilian tropicality. Yet, this method exposes a seemingly inherent contradiction: the appropriation and implementation of foreign constructs in the creation of a Brazilian institution. I argue that, despite their ostensibly oppositional natures, in 1950s Brazil, nationalism and internationalism were thoroughly intertwined and inseparable. Rather than position these ideologies as antithetical concepts, my dissertation reveals how they were dialectically related and in what ways their synthesis became the source of a newly configured image of modern Brazil. This study asserts that the wide-scale implementation of the economic theory of developmentalism - which merged nationalist and internationalist ambitions - and the specific tactic of import substitution industrialization, mobilized Brazilian ingenuity and initiative and was explicitly marshaled in Rio de Janeiro's expanding visual culture. ❧ Broadly conceived, this study contends that Brazilian modernisms at mid-century are representative of widespread international trends in which artists, architects and designers were searching for aesthetic forms and strategies that reconciled the vast new social, political and cultural conditions that characterized the postwar experience, with pre-war legacies. This dissertation also sheds light on how and why supposedly universal formal languages, such as geometric abstraction or modernist architecture, have been adopted in different national and historical contexts and how their signification changes according to the particular socio-political circumstances of a given place and time. It argues that the field of modernism is not a homogenous or monolithic phenomenon, but rather a complex web of narratives and responses to the social and political events that shaped the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The tropical modernisms featured in this study underscore the plurality of the field.

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TROPICAL MODERNISMS:
ART AND ARCHITECTURE IN RIO DE JANEIRO IN THE 1950S
by
Aleca Lipskey Le Blanc
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ART HISTORY)
August 2011
Copyright 2011 Aleca Lipskey Le Blanc